HisTochText - History of the Tocharian texts of the Pelliot Collection
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 788205)
Media
Title
Writings from Central Asia, 1st millennium - Georges-Jean Pinault
Date
May, 2022
Place
Conference in ILARA- THE INSTITUTE OF RARE LANGUAGES - One of the four Institutes of the Practical School of Advanced Studies – PSL
Summary
The scribes of the Indian world possessed, since the inscriptions of Asoka (middle of the 3rd century BC), two systems of syllabic writing, which were based on the same principle (abugida), namely the implicit notation of the vowel /a/ : the kharoṣṭhī (written from right to left, and derived from Aramaic) and the brāhmī (written from left to right). The Buddhist communities have had recourse to these two systems from the last centuries before our era, and the missionaries have conveyed, with the texts of Buddhism and the other elements of the manuscript and literary culture of India, these writings in Central Asia. , from the beginning of our era.
The kharoṣṭhī, associated with the notated texts in Northwestern Prakrit (Middle Indian), aka gāndhārī, has not undergone very significant changes, apart from the influence of the brāhmī. Brāhmī, which was very suitable for the notation of Sanskrit, underwent considerable development, and adaptations to local languages, which had different phonologies from the languages of the Indian world: Tocharian (A and B), Saka (Middle Iranian) from Khotan and Tumshuq, Old Turkish (Uighur). This resulted in new local syllabaries, many of which were modeled on the Brāhmī adapted for Tocharian, formerly the B language, spoken in the Kucha region north of the Taklamakan Desert in present-day Xinjiang. In addition, Sogdian, Middle Persian (both of the Middle Iranian stage) and Old Turkish were also noted by writings whose ultimate model is the Aramaic writing, transmitted from the West, along the roads commercial, and on the occasion of the spread of another religion, Manichaeism.
